T-Shirts

Firstly there is a new button up there in the menu called “Merch”, click this and it will take you to a store where you will be able to buy Squid In A Box merchandise like T-Shirts and mugs. Aside from buying the games buying some Merch is the best way you can help support me in developing new products. Right now there are 2 T-Shirt Designs available in mens and womens sizes.

Waves 2

Those that have been following the facebook page or my twitter will have noticed that over the last couple of months I’ve been hard at work porting Waves from the old Unreal Development Kit to the new Unreal Engine 4.

This is part of a project to bring you all a lovely shiny sequel to Waves (code named Waves 2: Wave Harder) in order to help fund Notorious (previously Waves: Arena Tactics).

Week one. The Arena is built.

The port is the first step on the road to a sequel, UE4 only uses C++ and I haven’t used C++ in about 5 years and even then only sparingly. With the highly favorable royalty terms(5% vs 25% for UDK) of UE4 I couldn’t justify carrying on development of Notorious on the older engine but Notorious is such a large project I couldn’t afford to spend a year porting the (far more complex) code for that game when I can barely remember how to C++.

Week two. How many enemies can we get working at once?

So far about 80% of the gameplay code is ported over to the new engine but there is still lots left to go with all the non-gameplay code such as GUI, Steam integration, leaderboards etc.

Week three. Killing enemies is a thing.

Everything is getting something of a face lift as I implement it as the engine has subtle differences which makes things possible that I couldn’t do before like GPU accelerated particle effects.

Week four. The HUD is ported over.

There is also a fair bit of code from Notorious in here as I just found better ways of doing things while I was working on that game and it was silly not to take advantage of them. The Enemies now have multiple AI behaviors and can prioritize targets which makes the possibility of multiplayer/co-op a reality now.

Week I’m not sure, lets say seven. More enemies get ported over.

The actual game modes have been made easier to author as well with the horrible Kismet powered system I was using before being replaced with a Hierarchical behavior tree which allows the game to look at the game state and make decisions about what is more appropriate to spawn to keep the game fun. That last bit will likely be where 90% of my balancing time goes I’m sure.

Week probably eight. The self replicating Blooms that make combos work appear for the first time.

This project also lets me go back and fix a lot of the things I didn’t like about Waves like the slow friends leaderboards and the way that after a while you could chain bombs almost forever.

Yesterday! The last of the non-boss enemies is ported over.

This is just the porting stage though. This is so I can get used to using C++ again and have a code base to work off and develop an actual Sequel. Most of the old game modes will return; although Challenge will be replaced with a completely new mode inspired by the Adventure mode in Hyrule Warriors, but they will be tweaked quite a lot and the details will be different. There will be some new enemies as well as the old ones (The Evader is now 200% more annoying) and some new weapon options borrowed from Notorious.

Keep an eye on here and the Facebook page for updates as I will be making Alpha access for early adopters available before the end of the year and should have a short video update available next week.

Update 1.4 went live on Sunday adding a seventh Game Mode to Waves. Currently this update is only available to Steam users until I get a patch out. However everybody that buys the game direct from this site still gets a Steam code to redeem if they want to access the online features. To celebrate […]

The start of November means only one thing… Fireworks! It also means that it’s time for a DevBlog about everything I’ve been doing in the previous 30 days. Here is a video. This was the first month where I really started to add content rather than work on invisible backend stuff like server browsers. In […]

8 Comments

Eric August 14, 2015 @
7:46 pm

Waves’ bomb chain doesn’t bother me – you have to be quite skilled to get to that level.

I also hope W2 has a score cap (counter stop) – it gives a sense of accomplishment, of satisfaction. The first time I hit it the counter went mad and I thought “wtf going on?”. Then when the game went over, my mind blown – I reached max int32. I still play W1 sometimes, and getting to the score cap is so good.

There is the “Zen of Waves”, you know? I hope that W2 still has that spirit.

Hi! Looking forward to it. I would pay through the teeth for two things:

1. Linux 2. A survival mode with no bombs, in which you must collect the multipliers not for more points, but for more lives. Let’s say three for one life or something like that. So you have to run through the middle to get them, tough with no bombs, big risk / reward, can’t just do laps of the outside forever.

For the love of squids will u plz make this a iOS release or at least a XBLA release as well as PC? I know u have the PC/STEAM thing down and I just feel this game would really take off considering how popular games like geometry wars 3:dimensions/RESOGUN ETC. are at the moment! I love waves and my only request is u release it on something other than PC if possible? iOS or Xbox live (or both). Getting this gem out there to more players would be great considering Xbox and PC are so easy to port to one another. May my tentacled daydreams come true. The t-shirts look amazing! I’m gonna order a black one. Good luck and keep up the amazing work! Oh one last thing Sorry! Will this new remake come w the original in any sort of bundle possibly or as an extra to unlock? Thanks!

[…] an indie charge down the throw-everything-at-the-sequel path. It's the reason I have concerns about Rob Hale working on Waves 2 to fund another game called Notorious. The original didn't do as well as Hale hoped; why will the follow-up which is probably going to […]